Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy

by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

  A Plea for Zombie Gladiators

  Let’s now take this philosophical thought experiment a crucial step further. It would be useful to have a visible way of distinguishing between zombies and conscios. We cannot see into their souls, because zombies have no thoughts, just as we cannot know for certain in ordinary circumstances whether another person, even one of long acquaintance, is truly conscious. Similarly, we cannot tell from behavior or conversation with another individual whether or not he or she has any interior light or is a philosophical zombie, a living robot devoid of mental states.

  Let us therefore suppose for the sake of argument that all and only zombies have a birthmark on the backs of their necks, shaped like the little round yellow smile or happy face we often find in advertising, but with a straight line for a mouth and x’s for eyes—

  The birthmark implies that zombies are born, not made, and that they stay that way for life. How do we know that all and only persons with the birthmark are zombies? Conceivably, the correlation could be verified when a CAT-scan detects the abnormal neurophysiology by which zombie behavior is autonomically controlled through neural exchange in the brain-stem only, with no activity in the brain’s frontal lobes as in normal conscious subjects.

  If we can visually distinguish zombies from conscios, then the practical possibility arises of treating them discriminatorily. Zombies, lacking conscious mental states, cannot experience pain, nor are they capable of intentions, beliefs, or desires. If morality presupposes these specific kinds of thought, as many moral theorists have assumed, then it would appear that zombies are in every sense amoral. They are never morally responsible for what they do, and their behavior as a result can never be morally right or morally wrong. If we can tell who (or what) is a zombie and who (or what) is not, then we might suppose that we can use zombies with moral impunity in any way we like, just as we use inanimate objects. Zombies will rebel and behave with indignation if we try to abuse them, just as we would. They will weep, strike back, protest, organize resistance, print leaflets condemning their treatment, and give lectures to rouse public opinion in their support. They will argue that the bad reputation they have received from the depiction of Hollywood zombies has created prejudice against them on the part of the conscious citizenry. From a moral point of view, on the present hypothesis, if we can restrain them, it nevertheless appears that we might be able without acting immorally to use zombies just as we use wood and stone and plants and lower animals for our own purposes in whatever ways we please.

  If zombies have no moral rights or responsibilities, then there should be nothing morally objectionable about organizing blood sports events involving zombie gladiators. Zombie gladiators can hack each other to death for our entertainment, just as conscious gladiators did in ancient times during the glorious days of the Roman Empire. Armed combat is exciting to watch, and we can think of zombie gladiatorial events as an extension of reality television and cinematic violence brought together as a live spectator sport. There are moral objections to pitting conscious persons against each other as gladiators, to be sure, since they are subject to sensations of pain, panic and the anticipation of death, and other kinds of psychological trauma. We would be wrong to allow such experiences to be inflicted on conscious subjects, even if they were to volunteer as gladiators.

  Where zombies are concerned, however, we need not concern ourselves about their mental states, because we know in advance that, despite their physical actions and reactions, they do not have any. Zombies no more hurt one another or feel pain when they battle it out in the coliseum than cartoon characters do when they clobber each other with mallets or flatten each other with steam rollers. Morally, their bloody confrontations are no more immoral than the mechanical contests we see waged between Battlebots on TV.

  It may take the public some getting used to. When zombies are cut with swords and hacked with halberds, they will not only gush blood, but exhibit the same pain behavior as conscious human beings. With enough advance publicity about the differences between zombies and conscios, however, there should eventually be no serious conscientious complaints about hosting zombie gladiatorial competitions in every major city, much as in Roman times.

  We turn to Lucius Annaeus Seneca, in his Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, with these disparaging words about the matinée gladiatorial contests in his day: “All the earlier contests were charity in comparison. The nonsense is dispensed with now: what we have now is murder pure and simple. The combatants have nothing to protect them; their whole bodies are exposed to the blows; every thrust they launch gets home.”53

  In contrast, zombies ought to make morally unobjectionable gladiators. They experience no pain when they are battered and stabbed, bludgeoned and mutilated, even though they bleed and behave exactly as if they were in agony. They also die in the biological sense just as we would, which adds to the pathos and drama of witnessing their combat. When zombies expire, however, there is no destruction of a person in the sense that there is no cessation of thought, no bringing down the curtain on what had been a more or less continuous stream of consciousness, no elimination of memories or expectations, no collapsing of intentions, and in particular no fear of impending death or anticipation or awareness, or any of the psychological trauma we may otherwise associate with violent death by sword and mace and trident in a gladiatorial confrontation.

  Zombie gladiators can go at it full tilt. They can put on a splendid carnal spectacle that will instruct at the same time that it fascinates. It will teach martial values, as it did for the ancient Romans, providing daily emotional catharsis and illustrating valuable techniques of strategy and self-defense. It will offer its audience a sublime surrogate confrontation with death and dismemberment that will help them to better appreciate the relative safety and comfort of their own lives. They will be glad that they are not gladiators, and, however irrationally, they will be glad that they are not zombies. At the same time, zombie gladiatorial events can be highly lucrative for everyone associated with the enterprise. Zombies themselves can be made to work (fight) for free, and the outlay for arenas, advertising and promotion, equipment and training, security and logistics should be minimal compared to the potential box office earnings from ticket sales, merchandizing, cable television franchising, and all the surrounding industry that is sure to grow up around the new sport.

  There are other respects too in which we can hope to improve on Roman gladiatorial events. We have more interesting and devastating weapons that require special kinds of skills to wield and do visually more absorbing kinds of damage to a human body. Thus, we read in Max Brooks’s manual, The Zombie Survival Guide,54 a playbook for dealing with outbreaks of Hollywood zombies, the following advice:The Flamethrower. This device, perhaps more than any other, strikes people as the ultimate zombie eliminator. A jet of flame, two hundred feet long, composed of jellied gasoline, can turn an Undead crowd into a wailing funeral pyre. So why not acquire one?

  Why not indeed? While we’re at it, why not outfit entire teams of zombies with these curious devices and turn those suckers loose on each other? And this is just the beginning. There are chainsaws and spear-guns, nail-guns, napalm and mustard gas, automatic machine guns of many different calibers, samurai swords, and all kinds of things that it would be cool to see zombies put to use in fighting each other to the death.

  There are likely to be some, perhaps even significant numbers of individuals, who choose not to attend gladiatorial battles, who will be offended or repulsed by the violence and bloodshed, or are afraid that they might be. There is, we must say at the outset, no accounting for taste in this or any other field. The same is true among a certain percentage of the citizens and visitors to such countries as Spain that continue to sponsor bull fighting, not as a sport, but, as Ernest Hemingway reminds us in Death in the Afternoon, the ritual killing of a bull.55 With such a striking comparison in mind, we can conclude that while there is a sound moral basis for objecting to the sufferings of a bull besieged by
picadors and the matador in a bull ring, there are no similar grounds for moral complaint against the maiming and slaughtering of zombie gladiators. The most ardent animal rights advocates can have no sound reason for objecting to zombie gladiatorial conflict. Zombie gladiators are meat robots, we might say, and nothing more. They are not persons with conscious feelings, beliefs and intentions; they do not hurt, and they do not intend to do what they do or have any beliefs or doubts, hopes, fears, expectations or disappointments. They are hollow shells, psychologically speaking, lacking all moral meaning and value.56

  Amorality of Zombies and Moral Obligations of the Conscious

  Or are they? Can there be good reasons after all for objecting on moral grounds to the institution of zombie gladiatorial competitions? There may still be questionable aspects of the proposal to use zombies as gladiators, even though they lack consciousness.

  Zombies, birthmarks aside, look superficially just like you and me, sharing the same characteristic human DNA type. They are capable of the same complex repertoire of behavior, “intelligent” conversation (at least from an external point of view to which we as conscious subjects are also limited), and apparent displays of feelings and emotions as the rest of us. Conscios are likely, therefore, in at least some instances, to develop emotional attachments, friendships, and feel sympathy, even concern and love, for zombies. The fact that they are indistinguishable from living persons encourages the possibility that some conscios may genuinely come to care for and even love zombies. When zombies have the backs of their necks checked and are taken away in armored vans to serve as gladiators, their plight might cause pain, suffering, and distress to the conscios who have developed personal feelings for them. If this were to happen, then even on the assumptions we are considering, it could be morally wrong for indirect reasons to promote blood sport competitions among zombie gladiators.

  The remedy is nevertheless quite simple. We need only keep zombies destined for gladiatorial combat isolated from the general population, raised by other zombies in zombie camps, and managed by zombies in every phase of their preparation for the sport. That way, no conscio could ever form an intimate emotional attachment to any zombie slated to become a gladiator. Similarly, we should probably suppose that zombies are never born to or raised by non-zombies once the gladiatorial games are instituted, so that there are no familial relations tying zombies to conscios. Zombies must be total strangers to those who are in attendance in the audience at a zombie gladiatorial event, if the moral probity of such events is to be maintained.

  Having started in this direction, we must then ask whether even these sorts of extreme precautions can possibly be enough to uphold the amorality of zombie gladiatorial contests. We must also somehow try to guard against vicarious suffering on the part of conscios at zombie bloodbaths. This challenge to the amorality of zombie gladiatorial competitions reveals something interesting about our understanding of the interrelation between consciousness and morality. Now perhaps we must expect to screen the members of an audience attending zombie gladiatorial events carefully and reliably to exclude any individuals who might suffer more emotional pain, anxiety, or trauma than an average audience member at the cinema, theater, or any non-gladiatorial sport. Assuming that these more conventional activities are morally unobjectionable, we cannot blame zombie gladiatorial competitions on moral grounds if those in attendance do not vicariously suffer more mental anguish than at less violent non-lethal entertainments, such as hockey tournaments, certain inflammatorily confrontational talk shows, or compelling performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

  There is still another moral consideration to be taken into account in contemplating zombie combat sports. We should try to judge the potential effect of witnessing socially approved massacres of creatures who, to all external appearances, except for their birthmarks, look and behave exactly like conscios capable of feeling pleasure and pain. The issue of widespread desensitization to repetitive acts of violence in movies, video games and gangsta rap as a factor in personal crime has already gained scientific and media attention. Whether or not these influences contribute significantly to violent behavior is likely to remain an open question in social psychology. It is nevertheless hard to see how exposing large numbers of viewers to live-action armed bloody killings as a sports event can help to improve the social climate of good will and compassion among the general population, on whom our happiness and security, such as they are, vitally depend.

  We must remember that the audience members pre-screened for admittance to zombie gladiatorial contests are precisely those who have demonstrated the least emotional distress in the presence of the sufferings of others. These of all persons are surely the greatest sociological risks to the population at large, after dosing on a steady diet of the most ferocious kinds of live action violence. Reflect also that we are imagining the whole entertainment industry apparatus organized behind zombie blood sports. There will be souvenirs, memorabilia, details of gladiatorial fights published in newspapers and broadcast on TV, documentaries, movies, T-shirts, coffee table books, and refrigerator magnets celebrating the most popular gladiators and the most dramatic maiming and killing. There will be everything, in short, that can contribute to the understanding that terrible violence has society’s full blessing, provided that it involves only zombies.

  For all intents and purposes, anyone attending a zombie gladiatorial event will nevertheless experience the carnage just as though it were perpetrated by and upon conscios. Officials can emphasize the fact that the gladiators are not conscious, that they are mere automata. What they cannot be expected to do is to fully dispel the impression that the combatants are thinking beings like ourselves, that they feel pain and know fear as they are crushed and ripped apart and do their best to crush and rip apart their opponents. The audience will know at a rational level that these Undead martial arts warriors have no interior mental life. At an emotional level, however, as they watch the violence unfold, they may find it impossible to draw what is supposed to be the crucial moral distinction between conscious subjects and zombie automata. They will see human beings killing human beings in what look to be the most painful ways possible, even if no pain is actually experienced by the participants, in a context of unqualified moral permissiveness. The audience members, many of them anyway, are certain to come away from the repeated experience with the ingrained sense that killing human beings as sport is socially acceptable.

  It should be obvious upon reflection that none of this is a particularly good thing. Even if no audience member ever becomes a dangerous psychopath and goes on a murder spree killing innocent conscios, there is still something morally objectionable about the proposal. What is wrong with using zombies as gladiators is that it enacts the socially condoned slaughter of genetically fellow human beings who just happen not to be conscious, and who as a result just happen to be incapable of feeling pleasure or pain. Human beings, even if they are transformed demonically into howling Hollywood zombies, strangling and cannibalizing all whom they may devour, are still human beings, however posthumous, as we can readily verify by counting their chromosome pairs (twenty-three). To validate killing members of our own species solely for the sake of entertainment, curiosity, morbid fascination and blood lust evinces an ideal that deprives all human lives of dignity. Thus, Roland Auguet argues:A gladiator, with movements clumsy and stiff because of his armour, half kneels and raises his hooked visor, pierced by mysterious holes, towards an imaginary grandstand, menacing with his curved sword the man prostrate at his feet. . . . In one sense these pictures, a little morbid and shocking, teach us a lesson: that the life of a man has not always had the value that our own morality strives to give it. In the past it could be a mere episode, and death the instrument of a collective pleasure.57

  Zombies have no moral rights. In the movies, Hollywood zombies are made morally acceptable targets of the worst acts of desperate violence. We can blow them up with dynamite, toast them with flamethrowers, lop off thei
r heads with machetes. They are, after all, already dead, slightly warmed over, and they threaten the rest of us unjustifiably with a most unpleasant end. We identify accordingly with the co-eds, deputy sheriffs, and shopkeepers pursued by roving gangrenous hordes of the Hollywood Undead.

  The zombie gladiators thought experiment, in stark contrast, says of human beings generally that it is morally permissible to have them kill one another for the enjoyment of conscious viewers. It is this symbolic statement that is made about the dispensability of human life that we may come to regard as morally indecent, a reprehensible public statement of a value judgment for which we, unlike zombies, would be morally responsible. The same is true whenever such life-cheapening values are acted out on the field of mortal combat, as much in the zombie thought experiment as in ancient Rome when the gladiators were conscious thinking subjects like ourselves. The symbolic import of setting up an institution in which human zombie gladiators slice and dice and slash and bash each other’s brains out as a form of popular entertainment is intrinsically morally objectionable. It is wrong, we might conclude, because of what it says about us and about our attitudes concerning the value of human life, even if the victims never feel pain and never suffer death throes when they are defeated, subdued, and delivered the final coup de grâce.